This Week in HTML 5: Web Forms 2, Search, and more
In Mark’s eighth roundup of HTML 5 land, he delves into the merging of Web Forms 2, which gives us fun things like:
- input type=”email”
- input type=”url”
- inpu type=”number”
- input type=”range”
- input type=”date”
- input type=”time”
- input type=”datetime”
- input type=”week”
- input type=”month”
Then Mark discusses input type=”search”:
Andy Lyttle wants to standardize one particular feature of <input type=”search”> (which is already supported by Safari, but not standardized): placeholder text for input fields. The text would initially display in the input field (possibly in a stylized form, smaller font, or lighter color), then disappear when the field receives focus. Lots of sites use Javascript to achieve this effect, but it is surprisingly difficult to get right, in part because no one can quite agree on exactly how it should work. Mozilla Firefox displays the name of your current search engine in its dedicated search box until you focus the search box, at which point it blanks out and allows you to type. Safari’s search box is initially blank (at least on Windows), and only displays the name of your default search engine after it has received focus and lost it again. Google Chrome’s “omnibox” displays “Type to search”, right-justified, even when the omnibox has focus, then removes it after you’ve typed a single character. Adding an <input placeholder> attribute would allow each browser on each platform to match their users’ expectations (and possibly even allow end-user customization) of how placeholder text should work for web forms. Discussion threads: 1, 2, 3. So far, there is no consensus on whether this should be added to HTML 5, or what the markup would look like.
And, he finishes with some interesting posts:
- Following up on last week’s article on clickjacking, the security researcher who discovered (and named) it has posted details of his discovery. Short version: it’s even worse than we thought, but vendors are working on it. Here’s a proof-of-concept against Adobe Flash that, quite literally, spys on you (via your webcam) without the usual warning dialogs; here’s Adobe’s response. NoScript now offers enhanced protection against some clickjacking attack vectors.
- Anne van Kesteren gives an update on IE 8’s support for HTML 5 and other emerging standards.
- Matt Ryall has a good article on HTML 5, headings and sections, which documents the differences between HTML 4 and 5’s header elements. My personal opinion: I once wrote a 500 page book in Docbook, a non-HTML markup language for technical writers. Docbook 3 had separate elements for
<sect1>,<sect2>,<sect3>, &c, and it was a massive pain in the ass to cut-and-paste sections, or try to reuse them in different documents. Docbook 4 added a generic<section>element which can be nested indefinitely, and all those problems went away. Lots of web authors copy-and-paste HTML markup; anything that helps that “just work” is a good thing.
